


Mustard

by Thanfiction



Series: Team Free Will Recipe Ficlets [5]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Recipes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-02
Updated: 2013-05-02
Packaged: 2017-12-10 04:53:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/782004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thanfiction/pseuds/Thanfiction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Part of a series of five ficlets where the prompt was to incorporate a relevant recipe in a character glimpse or study.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mustard

Angels cannot create life.  They can praise life, they can safeguard it, they can heal it, sometimes even in special circumstances restore it.  And oh, they can take it.  They can take it with a thought, with a touch, with a look, with any of uncountable weapons of Heaven and Earth alike.  But they cannot give it.  

He envies creation dearly.  In its absence, it is a pleasure to make, to nurture, a tiny balm on the deep-scorched wounds of guilt for all the destruction he wrought.  

There’s so much of the Father’s perfection in it all.  The intricacy of the interwoven nature that humans have guided and created and explored and innovated and molded into a pas de deux of original and derived, creator and creation-creator.  

Wheat of the fields, threshed and ground and bringing the memory of the Nazarine, Yeshu’a Ben Yosef and the irony that it had been his act of plucking such a grainhead on the Sabbath as a simple snack and his words on the sacrilege that had first planted his own mind with questions.  Wheat with barley, beans and lentils, millet and emmer ground together.  Water, wild honey from bees who didn’t have to be forced to create sweetness, olive oil he’d once seen more precious than gold, salt that had paid the Roman legions to march across these very fields.  Wild yeasts he coaxed from the air.  Bread and meat for the faithful in the wilderness.  

It was silly to choose a piglet.  The chickens were smaller, easier.  But the pig was right.  Rip up the rulebook.  Once “unclean” blood on his hands that would still serve good.  Yes.  Yes right in so many ways.  And better that for once, even if he had to kill again, he could do it right.  Two fingers on its nose and his energy slipping along its nerves, warm easy pleasure and it almost seemed to smile at him as the blade slid home unfelt.  

Compress time, six months of hanging and smoking and aging the ham into the touch of fingers.  Lettuce sprouted in his palm; the life already there, but he could help it.  Tomatoes from bud to lush, ripe scarlet in a flickering shimmer of Grace.  

Mustard seed, ground fine, biting sharp.  Faith of a mustard seed.  Fitting faith should hurt.  

A double handful of mustard seeds, cracked and half-ground in a mortar.  Soaked for an instant six days in sweet white wine half gone over to vinegar.  Salt.  Rosemary. Thick folds of more golden honey.  Nothing like the shocking yellow paste the boys favored, but he tasted it and it was good and they would like it, he was sure.  

Or at least he hoped so.  It was all he could do.  He wanted to make it all right, turn time on a grand scale, bring them all back, fix it all, heal it all, he’d never meant to…too…he stopped, handprints scorched deep into the wood of the farmhouse table as he fought the surge of hot guilt that could have made the vessel melt again. Trapped behind filth, abomination beyond words, using his vessel, his Grace, like drowning in a lake of shit and too ancient, too powerful to ever hope to undo.  Angels could only destroy.  Destroy and fail and break things.  

He didn’t know the voice, didn’t even know if he heard it or if it was just madness, but it was there on the whisper of the wind, in the rippling sines of his roiling waveform within the meager flesh.  A reminder.  A promise.  An ethereal thread like the invisible pheromones that guided the bees home to the hive.

Angels couldn’t create.  But they could love humanity.  It was what they were for.  And it might be enough, if he could only cling to enough faith.  No more than a mustard seed.    


End file.
